Sony Online Entertainment recently announced that its aging MMO, EverQuest, will soon shift from a subscription based model to a free-to-play experience. Unfortunately for users still playing the unsupported Mac version of the game, the announcement brings news that the Mac server will close forever when EverQuest goes F2P on March 29.

In a forum post SOE president John Smedley offered his apologies to Mac players, and announced a new poll on the EverQuest forums intended to reveal if there is enough interest to warrant the effort of creating a new Mac port of the current version of EverQuest.

Dear EQ Mac fans,

I'm truly sorry we're having to sunset this. I realize the players on the Al'Kabor server are extremely passionate. You should also know I'm personally a Mac (and Apple) fanatic, so it breaks my heart to have to do this. I've seen your emails and I sincerely appreciate you sending them to me. I've read them all. I'm posting here to reply because I don't want you to go unanswered.

I wanted to give you a little more information as to why we had to make this decision. So here are the reasons.

It uses a very old codebase that only one of our programmers knows. The simple truth is that's not something we can allow. We can't have a single point of failure and in this case we have one.

The user population is very small and it makes justifying adding additional coding resources hard.

The mac port is not particulary something we're proud of. The stuff we've done on Free Realms with Transgaming is far superior. Everquest was never designed to be a Mac game, and years ago we tried this and it never took off. Back when we did the port, Mac wasn't the hotness that it is now.

Why don't we give the players the source code and let you do it? Simply put - it's got too many proprietary things to make that feasible. We just can't do it.

What I will commit to is the following -

We will do a poll asking the question if people would consider using a Mac version of the CURRENT game (there is no way we would consider leaving the codebase as it is now.. it's impossible to maintain the way it is). If the response is large enough we will consider doing a proper mac port. I don't want this to be viewed as anything other than a commitment to running the poll. This isn't to placate you. I respect you too much for that. It's simply to look for a business case for doing this. We'll let you know our decision after running that poll.